


To Wield That Questionable Power

by alcibiades



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: F/M, Manipulative Relationship, Misandry (sort of), references to canon character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-04
Updated: 2014-05-04
Packaged: 2018-01-21 22:07:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1565726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alcibiades/pseuds/alcibiades
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If Harold Finch had seen her the day she met Nathan Ingram, without the Machine there to impart some kind of omniscient wisdom, he would have thought that she was an average young woman. Pretty, but not beautiful; someone who might have been ordinary except that she took care with her appearance. Root knows men, and she knows that neither he nor Nathan would have ever dreamed of the levels of deliberate artifice that made up that disguise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Wield That Questionable Power

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mr-finch (soubriquet)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/soubriquet/gifts).



> Written between the airing of season 1 and season 2.

She didn't mean to kill him. Not really. Looking back on it, she will admit that she let her anger, her frustration, get the better of her. He wasn't a bad man - no worse than the average, anyway. He was just in her way. And if she didn't let herself get carried away, every so often, then -- how was she supposed to know that she was even alive, in any way that mattered?

She met him outside a restaurant, waiting for a taxi. She was young enough that if the man who calls himself Harold Finch were to ever learn about everything that happened, he might think of it as a time when she was still Samantha Groves. The truth is that she was never Samantha Groves, not in the sense that he thinks. She knows that he and John Reese and probably Jocelyn Carter think that what happened to Hanna Frey changed her, twisted a piece inside her into some ugly, broken configuration that has never been repaired. But that piece was twisted a long time before Hanna ever disappeared; Sam Groves was Root from the time that she first realized that Disney movies were a laughable, fatuous joke and that in reality, there was nothing to keep human beings from doing what they were naturally inclined to do - lie, murder, rape, steal, beat their wives and children, betray the ones who loved them most. She was Root from the moment that she realized that inside a computer, there was a world of dependability, one she could manipulate to create a better reality, even if it was just on a screen.

It was later that she discovered there were ways to bring her dream out of the computer.

If Harold Finch had seen her the day she met Nathan Ingram, without the Machine there to impart some kind of omniscient wisdom, he would have thought that she was an average young woman. Pretty, but not beautiful; someone who might have been ordinary except that she took care with her appearance. Root knows men, and she knows that neither he nor Nathan would have ever dreamed of the levels of deliberate artifice that made up that disguise. No mother or sister ever taught Root how to dress herself, how to put on makeup. Reflected in the dark gleam of her fingernails, their corners perfectly rounded, cuticles immaculate, she sees only herself - her own effort, to learn what it meant to be a woman. To wield that questionable power.

When she met Nathan Ingram, she didn't have to tailor herself to suit him, because she had already been doing it for years. Molding herself into something that men found pleasing, unthreatening - a capable disguise for the instrument of vengeance she knew herself to be underneath. All it really took was a smile that lasted a second too long; Nathan Ingram wasn't a bad man, but he had his weaknesses, like all men. His interest might have been piqued by her looks, she knows, but it was held by her intelligence. If she had put on some sort of mask, a facade of vacuousness, she would have lost him. Perhaps Nathan's best-kept secret was that it wasn't just women he liked - it was women who were better than him. Smarter than him. Women who could beat him in an argument. Women who would eventually get tired of him when his ceaseless, glib charm started to grate, and leave him.

She's learned herself well enough that the physical mechanism of orgasm is easy to achieve; she knows how to get men to give it to her, or to take it from them if they're incapable of following her carefully placed hints. She has always been grateful that arousal is not the easily-triggered instinct for her that it is for men; that her body is always hers, and when she allows these men to take what they can from it, it is a gift that she's giving them. Not in the sense of the sacred, though; she's no moon-worshipping lunatic who believes her body is a holy temple. It is the knowledge that her pleasure can't be taken by force - a man can only do that to her if she lets him.

She's naked and he is still fully dressed; he rolls over onto his back when she makes only the vaguest attempt, and she straddles him. She puts her hands on his neck, almost like she's about to undo his tie, but instead she squeezes. He gives a little coughing noise she's sure is almost a hundred percent for dramatic effect. She looks at his face, and he doesn't look scared of her. Not at all.

"I could kill you right now," she says, triumphantly. He laughs at her; this is the moment of her ascension, the moment where he is completely vulnerable to her yet he believes her to be at his mercy. This is the moment where the completeness of her deception is obvious, if only to her. He doesn't realize that he is the prey, on his back.

She laughs too, tipping her head back and letting the sound bubble up out of her chest. Together they laugh and laugh, as though they're sharing some private joke, except the joke is different to both of them. 

He's not laughing later.


End file.
